You were taught that good leaders put their people first. So you did. You showed up for every hard conversation, carried your team’s stress and said yes when you needed to say no.

Somewhere along the way, you started losing yourself.

Kristen Hadeed knows that path well. She built a company famous for its compassionate culture and wrote the book on giving people permission to screw up. From the outside she had it all together. Inside, she was burning out, building resentment and running on empty.

Her new book, Human Leadership: The Courage to Face Ourselves and Each Other, is the honest story of what happened next and what she learned about leading in a way that works for your people and for you.

In this fireside chat, Kristen joins Achieve for a direct conversation about the core ideas in the book and the lessons that came at a cost. It’s built for HR, Talent, People and Team Leaders who give a lot and want to keep doing it without running out.

The central idea is simple and hard to live: the most human way to lead starts with refusing to abandon yourself.

The book giveaway

200 free copies of Human Leadership

We’re giving away 200 copies of Kristen’s new book to people who join us live.

Here’s how it works:

1. Register for the webcast.
2. Join us live on 11/4/2026
3. Claim your copy using the link we share during the session.

Copies are limited to the first 200 live attendees who claim one. When they’re gone, they’re gone. Save your seat now.

[Eligibility: U.S. shipping addresses only / one copy per person / ships after the webcast]

Register and Get Your Free Copy Today

Learn more about the book here: www.kristenhadeed.com/humanleadershipbook

About the speaker

Kristen Hadeed

Leadership speaker, author of Permission to Screw Up and Human Leadership

Kristen Hadeed started a cleaning company at 19 to pay for college. She had almost no leadership experience. When she landed a contract to clean hundreds of apartments, she hired 60 people, and most of them quit within days.

That failure became her education. Over 14 years she built Student Maid into a company known around the world for its culture of belonging and its focus on growing leaders. It reached an industry-leading retention rate in a business where people spent their days cleaning toilets.

Her first book, Permission to Screw Up, has sold more than 50,000 copies, and her TED Talk has more than 3 million views. She has been featured by TIME, Forbes, Inc., NBC, FOX and PBS, and she works with organizations across industries and around the world on culture, feedback, trust and resilience.

Her new book, Human Leadership: The Courage to Face Ourselves and Each Other (Wiley), comes out October 26, 2026.

Credit to Ling Wang Photography for the amazing photos above.